


Pure Genius At Work

by Saturdaynightspecial



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Blow Jobs, Desperate Boys, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Grinding, Hand Jobs, Kissing, M/M, Making Out, Nightmares, Porn with Feelings, Post-Canon, Praise Kink, Spooning, no beta we die like horny men, slight PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-06
Updated: 2020-01-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:08:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22139062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saturdaynightspecial/pseuds/Saturdaynightspecial
Summary: Pulling back instantly—he was so attentive, always—Riku rose on his arms to give Sora a few inches of space, his eyes so full with concern it drew Sora’s hands out to cradle his face. “Talk to me, Sora,” Riku was saying, his hand tangling them together. “What do you need?”He wanted to say so many things—wanted to tell Riku all the horrible things he’d seen, wanted to say that he wasn’t sure his soul wasn’t talking real walks through that place instead of hallucinated ones, wanted to share that burden with someone else while knowing it wouldn’t lighten it at all—and could not.“Kiss me,” came out instead, and—yes, that was what he needed, to be so smothered in light everything else would leave him in peace, simply stubborn weeds Riku would remove and replant, piece by soiled piece.
Relationships: Riku/Sora (Kingdom Hearts)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 121





	Pure Genius At Work

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amberwing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amberwing/gifts).



> Another fic posted on a Sunday because I forgot on Saturday, and another instance of creative grinding. (I'm not sorry.)
> 
> This was actually my VERY first E fic from several months back that I forgot I never posted, and I still quite like it. 
> 
> Thanks to my buddies for bullying/reminding me about this one, this one's for you. (And for amberwing, who told me she reads it once a week, you angelic creature.)

_ Sora was awake, but not awake. _

_ It was hard to tell in the twilight between slipping into another dream, the lucid consciousness of it allowing him a moment to test the boundaries, pressing his hands into the barrier of wakefulness and feeling its elastic resistance before turning away to slip back under. _

_ Everything was sensation in dreams, and he lapped it up greedily, ate it whole with the desperation of someone who had too fresh memories of feeling nothing at all. _

_ This one was a riot of feelings—colors swirling in his periphery, but it was a tunnel, now—he dragged his hands through its incorporeal essence and it flowed like viscous water, like it was alive, soft laughter on the back of his neck, he leaned back into it, dunking his hair into the spray—it smelled of candy, of improbable things of dreams. _

_ Swirls of it gathered in his hair, the backs of his eyes technicolor with feelings, and he was so distracted with floating on the tide carrying him forward that he didn’t notice the slightest dip downward, the slow crawling feeling like tapping nails down his spine. _

_ The whisper was no longer a whisper, and the water, stickier and thick, closed over his head and began to drag, and the voices rang in his ears as he suffocated, his own hands clawing upwards, blindly, his eyes were glued shut and the pressure was compacting, forcing him under, under, under— _

_ Alive—- _

_ Alive—- _

_ ALIVE— _

_ Sora!  _

He snapped awake still gripped by unseen hands and teeth and glowing eyes, grappled with the hands on his and bucked when they didn’t give, snapped his head from side to side and tried in vain to summon the keyblade, but he couldn’t feel it because he was  _ dead _ , of  _ course _ he was dead, how had he  _ forgotten _ that—

Someone was pressing down, stabilizing his head; he snapped at them, something animal in him wanting to sink his teeth in, and they were speaking but it didn’t sound like words, everything vacuumed out of him—but the vignette around his vision was fading out, and a weakness was under that, weary and sluggish as quicksand as the dark was peeled from him like a second skin by warm hands.

He sunk back into the mattress—everything ached like he’d just run a mile, it was hard to breathe, so he focused on that—and his hands, finally, relaxed under the pressure at his wrists. Copper coated his mouth, metallic and sharp where he’d bitten his lip as he swiped it with his tongue.

“Sora?” Came the voice again, and Sora opened his eyes, hadn’t realized they were closed.

“Riku?” He rasped, voice like sandpaper.

Green eyes filled his vision for a second before Riku was releasing Sora’s wrists from where he’d been pinned to turn his chin left and right, inspecting it for damage. “You were having a nightmare—I think, it was—different than usual. I—I couldn’t reach you.” Riku’s inspection finished, he met his eyes again, brow furrowed deeply. “Do you know where you are?”

He—for a moment Scala flickered, a double image on top of their dark bedroom, white buildings thrust into the sky, and Sora was screaming—and he blinked, and it was gone, only Riku’s worried eyes in the endless dark. Another blink, to clear his muddled head, and the spires of the dead world rose to drag him under, a cold breeze he couldn’t feel on his  _ skin—he had no skin, he would never feel anything on it again _ —the vision flickered in and out like static. “No,” he whispered. His vision swam so he closed his eyes. “Not really.”

Riku exhaled. “Okay,” he said, and sunk down to press his weight into Sora, his legs on either side of Sora’s hips, the weight a welcome tether. “You’re in our room on destiny islands, it’s late, you were having that—nightmare—again, but we’re both alive, we’re breathing, and everything is okay.”

Well, the last one or two may have been a lie.

“Keep talking,” Sora murmured, as his hands crawled slowly up, up—under Riku’s shirt, pressing into the skin there—sweaty, like it had taken force to hold Sora down, to keep him from hurting himself again. Faint raised scratch marks under his shoulder blades made him pause, on either side of the sigil he knew was there, knew like his own skin. Had he...Sora probably had done that, in the struggle. The marks were too long to have been made by strictly human hands.

He became aware of Riku murmuring in his ear, mundane little things like how the tide looked right now, high under a full blood moon, and how it was nearing the end of summer and soon the shore birds would be leaving for their trek south, how Riku had been thinking of going with them, someday. The words didn’t matter, of course—it was Riku’s voice, supplying him divets and places to put his hands on his climb back into himself, and Riku’s hands cradling him as he tried to put bend himself back into the shape of Sora; remembered what form his body took instead of a vibrating, vacillating series of signals and noise.

Eventually, he could breathe, again—focused on the sound of Riku’s heart beating through his fingers and wrists and chest and anywhere Sora could press in, mesmerized by the patches of white he could leave behind before the blood rushed back in, in the feeling of alive, alive, alive. 

Riku had lapsed into silence, nuzzling Sora’s hair and ear and pressing little kisses there, reassuring and warm and whole, and feeling slammed back into him with it, a shudder that wracked him from head to toes, almost a whimper on its tail, like he was about to cry.

Pulling back instantly—he was so attentive, always—Riku rose on his arms to give Sora a few inches of space, his eyes so full with concern it drew Sora’s hands out to cradle his face. “Talk to me, Sora,” Riku was saying, his hand tangling them together. “What do you need?”

He wanted to say so many things—wanted to tell Riku all the horrible things he’d seen, wanted to say that he wasn’t sure his soul wasn’t talking real walks through that place instead of hallucinated ones, wanted to share that burden with someone else while knowing it wouldn’t lighten it at all—and could not.

“Kiss me,” came out instead, and—yes, that was what he needed, to be so smothered in light everything else would leave him in peace, simply stubborn weeds Riku would remove and replant, piece by soiled piece.

Riku, hair lit by moonlight tinged red so it made him look like something otherworldly, eyes so dark in the room they could have been any color Sora needed them to be, Riku who smelled like home and warm and looked death itself in the eyes to bring him back, who had nightmares of his own about that, nightmares he didn’t have a dream eater to end for him—nodded, and the press of his lips on Sora’s felt like breaking the surface.

——

Sora was going to die all over again at the hands of this moment.

It would happen, he was sure, between these moments of sweet surrender, between the feathery brushes of Riku’s mouth behind the shell of his ear, the barest flick of tongue as he hovered over the shell and the press of his back into the sheets.

The awareness he was quivering settled over him like a fog, and his arms tightened around Riku’s neck for purchase. He tilted his head back, stomach tightening with the feeling of being so open, with the memory of a fist wrapped around his throat with worse intentions, of his blood pounding in his ears as he fought for breath. The memory was being rewritten, erased and remade with every heady exhale against his throat, with every gentle press and suck and lick against his jugular, the action so good every nerve was a live wire.

Riku was whispering words into his collarbones like secrets, his breath melting invisible shapes into the skin, making Sora’s nails scrabble down his shoulder blades to press him closer. He had never been so cold and warm at once.

Riku was nuzzling—nuzzling into the space between his shoulder and the side of his neck, pressing with open, wet kisses that made Sora arch up in response, begging for more pressure, more. Riku compiled, scraped his teeth along and point and Sora nearly sobbed with relief.

Distantly, he was aware Riku was saying something, but it felt very far away.

“You’re shaking,” Riku murmured, sliding back up, and the grounding of his forehead against Sora’s was a benediction. Seeing straight was becoming difficult, his mind reduced to concepts like more and yes and please, but he tried, because the vision before him was sweeter than dreams because it was Riku.

Sora threaded a hand up, up, up, teasing rhythm along the back of Riku’s skull, tangling at the base of tiny hairs there and tugging, smoothing, apologetic. “‘s just a lot,” he tried, and, wow, his voice was shot, wrecked and hollow like a ship on helpless shores. 

If Riku’s arms hadn’t been anchoring him, he was certain he’d be gone by now, watching all of this from his place in the stars. 

Riku looked up at him for a long moment, lakes of placid green as he rested his head on Sora’s chest. Long fingers found his own for a moment, threaded themselves there and slotted into place. “I know the feeling,” he said, and Sora felt his own heart in the echo of Riku’s ribcage.

“Tell me to stop and I will. For any reason,” Riku was saying, but Sora was watching the press of his lips in a barely open mouth, the flash of tongue behind teeth—and the tug was so strong he nearly cut him off with the need to have him close again, fisted his free hand in the front of his collar and pulled.

Someone pressed a breathy laugh into the kiss, and Sora pressed back with soft tongue and more and was swallowing a helpless little moan like he’d been starving, the whole of his awareness reduced to pliant open lips and tongue and the barest scrape of canines on his bottom lip. A hand raked roughly through his hair, grabbing and twisting in the way Riku knew he loved, and Sora nearly growled into the kiss in response, tightened his hands in the fabric of Riku’s shirt and tugged.

“ _Off_ ,” he managed, but it came out more like a desperate whine.

Instead, Riku was smiling, pressing kisses to the side of his mouth, so close Sora could see pale eyelashes—he wanted like he never had, needed the pressure of Riku and lips and everything against him, and this slow pace was both maddening and so good—he made an impatient sound to tell him so, but Riku was only laughing and pressing prayers into the other side of his mouth, so he snaked a hand out to hook under his chin and kiss him again.

“We need to—stop to—to get it off,” Riku was panting between them, eyes dark and half lidded in a way he’d never seen, and it was trailing fire down his spine in the worst best worst way. The feel of his clothing felt wrong, somehow, but he couldn’t remember why, words were so hard—

“I know,” Sora said helplessly, already his vision filled with bitten, swollen lips, imagining the press against his mouth, his chest, lower—drunk on the the electric current pulled taught between them. “Just can’t,” he managed, and Riku squeezed his eyes shut and released a broken exhale, which was fine for Sora as he surged forward and claimed his lips again, pressing insistently into his mouth, mapping his bottom lip with his teeth, drag and pull and gasp.

“Sora,” Riku managed between kisses and stilted breaths, pulling back so Sora chased him up. “Sora,” he groaned, like they were trying to speak different tongues to say the same thing.

“I know,” he breathed, as Riku’s hands dragged liquid fire up his sides under his shirt, down to his hips and squeezed, his stomach tightening in response; he choked on his name. “I know.”

Riku pressed him down with a firm roll of his hips, enough to send Sora gasping long enough for Riku to sit up and remove the offending shirt for him, shivering a little as Sora’s hands rose to make trails down the valley of his stomach, hungry in a way he hadn’t been in the dreams, tugging at Riku’s hips and hoping he would understand.

Bared skin met his and Sora could have cried, so much life between them, so much he wanted to disappear into it.

“What do you need?” Riku asked him, between whispered kisses and sucks to his collarbone, Sora burying both hands into his hair to keep him there.

What  _ did _ he need? He felt electric, untethered, so far from his body he was watching from above—what he needed was  _ gravity _ , heavy weights to press in and around and trap him, a willing captive.

“Hold me,” Sora breathed, and Riku’s hands tightened on his hips in response. “Touch me,” he continued.  _ Make me remember I’m here. _

His voice was a fond press of lips against Sora’s chest. “Is that both at once, or one after the other?"

“I know you can handle both,” Sora huffed, and Riku laughed against his throat, the sound a bright reverberation to his very soul as Riku tilted them gently over.

Riku’s arms went around him easily, his back to Riku’s chest, both on their sides and slotted together, their legs tangled until it was hard to tell whose was whose, and Sora shook harder, overwhelmed with so many things he didn’t know what to do with them except trust Riku to sort them out, to take them and pull them into perfect clarity.

His hands scrambled for a grounding point, one reaching blindly behind him for hair between his fingers, One fishing in the sheets to stem and rising tide of want, the press that made him lift his hips into the air had Riku not pressing him down. The fear faded easily, lost in the gentle swell of rising  _ need _ , for  _ completion _ , for  _ connection _ .

The moment before the press of gentle hands was the rush of breath before a leap, gathering behind his chest and making him hyper aware of every nerve in his body, the cool air playing over his exposed skin. “ _ Riku _ ,” he said insistently, moving to grab one of his hands and bring it forward as Riku breathed an apology into his hair.

It was tenderness like he’d never felt, like he’d never thought he deserved to feel—he wasn’t used to gentle, he was used to  _ fast and bite and kill and death _ , in nightmares and in this—but Riku’s palm began making a lazy track from his heart, dipped to his navel to trail along the edge, and back up to trace slow circles along the raised edges of his scar, dragging energy with him, a current tingling to his toes.  _ More _ was making itself known again, whispering to him, so he arched back into Riku, feeling the evidence of his want in turn, unthinkingly catching, dragging Riku’s hand until it grazed his throat—and stopped.

The sensation was...everything at once, every battle he had almost lost and every time they had won, Riku’s hand splayed flat over his chest, the barest of pressure on his windpipe—just enough to secure, to ground.

He had stopped breathing, and he knew this before Riku made to remove his hand, to encourage Sora to breathe, but he didn’t need to, he was so drunk on Riku already, on  _ wanting _ , his whole body singing, struck like a tuning fork to Riku’s tone.

“Okay?” Riku was whispering, warm and breathy on the shell of his ear, and Sora nodded, swallowed, once, enough for him to feel it, and clasped his hand around Riku’s, both of them keeping him there, the barest pressure on his neck like a kiss, like a caress.

“K-keep it there,” Sora was saying, needing to say it, and Riku did.

He was half-delirious, probably, but he needed Riku to hear it, needed to tell him he would rather burn the memory of familiar hands around his throat into his subconscious; would rather it be Riku’s than someone else.

Willingly pinned between hands and body and throat and hips, the feeling of  _ safe _ warred with  _ adrenaline _ , heightened every feeling until it hurt, every drag of Riku’s skin an overload.

Overwhelmed, he wanted cry to with all the things fighting to escape his chest, but instead he pulled at Riku’s hair and rolled and arched again until Riku got it—was running his hands down his sides and front, inching his boxers down until another strip was exposed to the sky and air and cold, and Riku’s fingers dancing along it was a fine instrument he was playing, the notes a secret between them.

“Please,” he said, nearly sobbing with his want. “Please, RIku--I--”

“Shhh,” he was saying, Sora’s skin tingling with the feeling of it behind his ear. Riku’s hand trailed his stomach, playing under the waistband of his boxers, too-hot fingertips on clammy skin “I’ve got you.” Riku’s lips found his pulse point and kissed. “I’ve got you,” he said again, and his palm finally moved down and slipped underneath, to wrap itself where Sora wanted it most.

He arched backwards so hard he connected with Riku’s shoulder, pushing up into the hand on him, anything to expel the storm raging in his stomach, the need to  _ move feel touch _ —to have something under his hands,  _ Why was there nothing in his hands— _

Riku was whispering in his ear, and his other hand gripped firmly at Sora’s throat—he had found Sora’s hand again, and that felt better—a little harder now he was preoccupied, and that was better than the slow drag of Riku’s hand over him, felt so good Riku was wrenching cries from his throat that sounded like pleads and  _ more _ and  _ don’t stop _ , he would perish if Riku stopped and if he  _ didn’t _ stop, he was careening towards the edge—-

“Riku— _RikuRikuRikugodRiku_ —“

“ _ Love you _ ,” Riku was murmuring into his ear, a little broken, a little wanting. “You’re so good, Sora—so good, I have you, you’re right here—“ Whispering with arms holding him down and finger pads on his throat and a hand stroking him in steady waves, so much feeling exploding out of him and sent back to him through Riku like a closed circuit of feelings as Sora writhed and moaned and needed. “ _ God—god I love you—“ _

Sora wanted to say it back, but the words were so far beyond him now, he’d dropped them in the space between heaving breaths and Riku rolling hips against him in time with his strokes, in pushing his shoulder up and up and burying his hand in Riku’s hair and pulling forward until Riku got the hint and  _ bit _ and Sora cried out, a little too hard but  _ perfectly _ hard—hoped Riku could read it anyway, could feel Sora breaking at the seams under his hands on his throat and neck and everywhere there was to touch.

He realized he was crying on a particularly good downstroke, when Riku met it perfectly and he curled around Sora tight as a vice, groaning his name helplessly into his shoulder as Sora felt his release spill over his back and between them, and Sora slipped a hand back to rest on his thigh, to encourage him to grind through it, so full of love he didn’t know what else to do, and he was so  _ close _ , too—

But Riku was peeling himself off Sora, who was so far gone it was hard to even form the question properly, he didn’t have long to ask as Riku was pinning him down again, their lips connected as Sora tried to buck up into him even as Riku hovered, tracing tear tracks with soft kisses, Sora nipping at his lips in protest—the sudden lack of friction  _ maddening— _ but Riku only laughed against his mouth and slunk down his body, hair trailing behind in a silver wave as Sora watched him suck and kiss and lick until he could watch no longer, his stomach contracting and his head thrown back to the pillows as Riku reached his destination—sent him one cocky, satisfied smile as he licked his lips, and took him into his mouth.

“ _ Yes—Fuck _ , oh my God,  _ Riku— _ “

Sora gasped so hard his lungs burned with it, it wouldn’t be long at all, he knew—he was burning and falling and tumbling and Riku had found one of his hands and Sora clung to it like an anchor, the other buried so deep in Riku’s hair he pulled, earning an answering groan as he watched those eyes slide closed— white knuckled like a lifeline as he tried to buck into that mouth—and closed them again as Riku swallowed him down completely—the storm finally took him, flashed brilliant white, a lightning strike behind his eyelids as he cried and scrabbled and dug into Riku’s hands with his nails, his mouth open in a silent scream, arched as far as he could be under Riku’s stabilizing arm across his hips.

Everything was spots and breath and meaningless noise and the sound of two heartbeats for several minutes, Riku sliding back up his body to pillow his head on Sora’s chest, Sora’s arms flopping over his shoulders in welcome, his eyes still squeezed tight as he tried to come back to his body, chest heaving against him. His limbs were all a mess of tingles, twitching a little with the aftershocks.

“ _ Riku _ ,” Sora said, which was all he could say as Riku rubbed circles into his back and pressed mindless little kisses to his hairline, holding him as he came down.

“I have you,” He said back, punctuating Sora’s tremors with ones of his own. “It’s okay.”

He pressed a kiss to what already felt like a bruise along Sora’s throat, and Sora shivered in response. “That one’s going to leave a mark,” Riku murmured, and frowned a little. “Did I...hurt you?”

Sora laughed, breathlessly. “That’s kind of the point.” A mark, a grounding thing he could press to remind himself this really happened, that he wasn’t wearing the unblemished, bloodless skin of the dead. “Besides. I hurt you too,” he said, with a sweep up to his shoulders and back that made Riku flinch.

‘That wasn’t—you weren’t yourself,” He said, the concern in his gaze like a warm summer night, so Sora had to pull him up and kiss him until it was all he saw, too lazy to even close his eyes again despite the pull of sleep, and he wrapped his arms and tugged until he was secure in Riku’s next and his scent and his arms. “You—you scared me.”

“I’m okay, I promise,” he said, and Riku sighed against his hair, a promise to talk about  _ this _ little habit later. “I wanted you to.”

Riku’s half lidded eyes followed him, rubbed calloused hands across his knuckles in a gesture so openly tender his toes curled. “Okay,” he said simply.

“Thank you,” Sora said in a small voice, arms pressing into the warm skin of Riku’s back, avoiding the marks.

“For what?” Riku murmured, gently cradling Sora’s face to look at him—he always did that, he needed to know if Sora was okay, soft green filling his vision like an embrace, so much acceptance there it made Sora’s throat thick.

“For loving me,” he managed.  _ For knowing why I need this, this way, for knowing what I need. _

“That’s—there’s no need to thank me for that, I don’t—“ Riku said, and he had to stop, to swallow, to blink too quickly, so Sora kissed his forehead, slow and sweet and strong, and his eyes, and the furrow in his brow, and everything was warm and green and good. “I love you,” He said instead, and Sora smiled, fond and slow.

He stroked Riku’s cheekbone, a slow trail back to his ear and held it there, scratching lightly. “I love you more,” he mumbled, sunlight in his chest.

“Not possible,” Riku was mumbling, but it was slurred out and mumbled at the edges as Sora petted his scalp. Sora could hear his heartbeat slowing into sleep.

“Sure,” Sora mumbled back as they curled around each other. “But it’s true.”

The dreams left him for the rest of the night, nowhere left in his heart for them to take root with so much light as his back.

**Author's Note:**

> My nerves are turned on. I hear them like  
> musical instruments. Where there was silence  
> the drums, the strings are incurably playing. You did this.  
> Pure genius at work.  
> Darling, the composer has stepped into fire.
> 
> -The Kiss by Anne Sexton


End file.
